Google Cloud introduces the Gemini agent, a single agent that answers questions, handles knowledge work and writes code, Thomas Kurian said at Gemini at Work 2026. It runs models from Google and Anthropic. Merck, Bradesco and Ryanair are customers; Santee Cooper expects up to 75% faster financial modeling.
Google launches a unified Gemini agent for businesses that plans work from objectives, connects to Slack, Jira, Snowflake and MCP servers, and has its own Workspace account. Users can pick models, including Anthropic's Claude. Google says real-time spend caps will limit costs. Consumers follow later; Pichai cites 1 billion monthly users.
NVIDIA opens preorders for RTX Spark Windows laptops, shipping Oct. 16, with compact desktops due in November. NVIDIA says the chip pairs a Blackwell GPU with a Grace CPU, up to 128GB unified memory and one petaflop of FP4 compute. Microsoft also makes Microsoft Execution Containers generally available for agents on Windows.
The Pentagon says it has ceased using Anthropic's Claude after designating the company a supply chain risk, a statement to the BBC confirms. Meta reportedly cut its Claude Code seats from 60,000 to about 30,000, and Microsoft trimmed expected Anthropic spending by more than a third. The pullbacks come weeks before Anthropic's planned IPO, which Bloomberg reports could occur the week of Nov. 9.
Anthropic puts Claude into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides through a public beta add-on available on paid Claude plans, dated October 6, 2026. Users can switch between Ask before edits and Accept all edits modes. New beta connectors let Claude create and edit Google files from chat once owners enable them on Team and Enterprise plans.
Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri, a sovereign German-English open-weight AI model for mission-critical government and industry use, combining 78 billion total parameters with roughly 3 billion active per token and training data screened against a 4.5-million-URL blocklist.
Anthropic expands Claude for Startups by offering qualifying young companies a free year of Claude Team, up to five premium seats, and $1,000 in API credits, plus Marketplace access and Applied AI office hours.
Cohere launches North 2, an enterprise agentic AI platform that lets organizations build multi-step agents and deploy them in self-hosted, VPC, hybrid, on-premises or air-gapped environments, with North Admin enforcing access controls and token-spend limits.
Companies are accelerating moves to open-source and sovereign AI after Anthropic’s June 30-day chat-retention mandate for Fable and Mythos raises privacy concerns, prompting Booz Allen to restrict Fable use before new zero-data-retention options arrive Sept. 1.
HackerRank now offers Chakra, an AI interviewer that condenses recruiter screens, take-home tests and engineer follow-ups into one repository-based coding interview while scoring candidates’ reasoning and AI fluency, with humans retaining final hiring decisions.